While I enjoy and treasure the writings of Joseph Ratzinger I find the essay of Stanislaw Grygiel on “The New Evangelization” also quite worthy of admiration. I greatly like Ratzinger’s positive motivation for the new evangelization: “The deepest poverty is the inability of joy, the tediousness of a life deemed absurd and contradictory. This poverty is widespread today, taking many different forms. It can be found as much in societies that are materially rich as in countries that are poor. The inability of joy presupposes and produces the inability to love, it produces envy, greed, all those vices that destroy the life of individuals and of the world. This is why we need a new evangelization. If the art of living remains unknown, all else falls apart.” (Joseph Ratzinger, “The New Evangelization”, page 389). This focus on the spiritual bankruptcy of so many societies allows for the offer of living water to a thirsty world.
Grygiel reminds us, though, the “new evangelization” started in Poland, at the foot of the Cross: “Pope John Paul II first spoke of the “new evangelization under the cross of the Cistercian Abbey at Moglia” (Stanislow Grygiel, “The New Evangelization” in Discovering the Human Person, page 85). He makes this focus of John Paul’s sermon the cornerstone of his essay; “Where the cross is raised, there is raised the sign that the place has now been reached by the Good News of Man’s salvation through Love. Where the cross is raised, there is the sign that evangelization has begun.” (Ibid.). Is this something new? While evangelization is not new, the “new evangelization” is something new, it is the beginning of the post-Marxist evangelization, starting in Poland. John Paul II, in his homily at Moglia in 1979, proclaims the new evangelization through a Catholic understanding of work, a direct challenge to Marxist communism: “The Cross cannot be separated from man's work. Christ cannot be separated from man's work. This has been confirmed here at Nowa Huta. This has been the start of the new evangelization at the beginning of the new millennium of Christianity in Poland. We have lived this new beginning together and I took it with me from Krakow to Rome as a relic.” (John Paul II, Homily at Moglia, Poland, 9 June 1979).
Grygiel takes this theme of the new evangelization as proclaiming the Gospel to those enslaved to a Marxist worldview and brings it to out through the cross at Nova Huta, a city built as a new future for Poland by the communists, a future without Christianity: “Under the cross of Nowa Huta, where the Ark Church was built and consecrated by Cardinal Wojtyla in 1977, a new people was born. 'The new cross . . . proclaimed the birth of a new church.' . . . Under this cross, people were transformed. Their work was transformed, because under this cross their love matured to the new resurrection. The mystery of love, of work, and of the resurrection is bound to the mystery of the cross.” (Stanislow Grygiel, “The New Evangelization” in Discovering the Human Person, page 86). The new evangelization brings people out of their Modernist, Marxist anthropology and into a Christian anthropology, one dependent upon the Cross of Jesus Christ: “Without the scientia crucis of people who stand under the cross, society becomes a mass of individuals who may at times function intelligently, but who always act stupidly, because they lack the meaning to which the empty tomb points. They debase themselves in their hiding places, where they seek a refuge that allows them to escape the cross. This anthropological error, which consists in refusing to be martyrion, makes them fall prey to the conviction that life is exhausted here and now, in saeculo. Hiding, that is fleeing from the cross and the empty tomb, they become secularized”. (Ibid., page 87). Thus, the new evangelization brings people to the cross, through which they escape the “tediousness of a life deemed absurd and contradictory” Joseph Ratzinger, “The New Evangelization”, page 389) and their spiritual bankruptcy, becoming filled with the joy of the resurrection.
